htmlSQL class - quite nice way of parsing html

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htmlSQL class - quite nice way of parsing html

General December 11th, 2007

Today I found a class written in PHP which implement the idea of using SQL syntax while parsing HTML documents - htmlSQL. The idea of the author - Jonas David John - is quite simple. If you want to parse a HTML document, let’s way you want to parse all divs with class “row”,the syntax will look like normal SQL:

SELECT * FROM div WHERE $class == "row"

Looking familiar isn’t it? There is also function connect() /which define the html source/ and fetch_array() which contain the results after the query.

There are few examples included in the library package and here is the simplest one:

<?php

    /*

    ** htmlSQL - Example 1

    **

    ** Shows a simple query

    */

    include_once("../snoopy.class.php");

    include_once("../htmlsql.class.php");

    $wsql = new htmlsql();

    // connect to a URL

    if (!$wsql->connect('url', 'http://codedump.jonasjohn.de/')){

        print 'Error while connecting: ' . $wsql->error;

        exit;

    }

    /* execute a query:

       This query extracts all links with the classname = nav_item   

    */

    if (!$wsql->query('SELECT * FROM a WHERE $class == "nav_item"')){

        print "Query error: " . $wsql->error; 

        exit;

    }

    // show results:

    foreach($wsql->fetch_array() as $row){

        print_r($row);

        /* 

        $row is an array and looks like this:

        Array (

            [href] => /feedback.htm

            [class] => nav_item

            [tagname] => a

            [text] => Feedback

        )

        */

    }

?>